DEMOGRAPHIC RESEARCH VOLUME 36, ARTICLE 49, PAGES 1491,1514 PUBLISHED 5 MAY 2017 http://www.demographic-research.org/Volumes/Vol36/49/ DOI: 10.4054/DemRes.2017.36.49 Research Article The quest for a ‘better life’: Second-generation Turkish-Germans ‘return’ to ‘paradise’ Nilay Kılınç Russell King © 2017 Nilay Kılınç & Russell King. This open-access work is published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License 2.0 Germany, which permits use, reproduction & distribution in any medium for non-commercial purposes, provided the original author(s) and source are given credit. See http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/de/ Contents 1 Introduction 1492 2 Lifestyle migration and second-generation ‘return’ 1494 3 Methodology and the research setting 1497 4 General characteristics of the sample 1499 5 Narrating the ‘return’ through the lens of lifestyle choices: Escape, 1500 leisure, and a search for self 5.1 Escapism 1501 5.2 Balancing work and leisure 1504 5.3 Searching for one’s true self and a better life 1506 6 Concluding discussion 1507 References 1511 Demographic Research: Volume 36, Article 49 Research Article The quest for a ‘better life’: Second-generation Turkish-Germans ‘return’ to ‘paradise’ Nilay Kılınç1 Russell King2 ABSTRACT BACKGROUND This paper uses a lifestyle-migration lens to analyse the ‘return’ of the Turkish-German second generation to their parents’ homeland, Turkey. It focuses on a scenically attractive touristic region, Antalya on the south coast, where second-generation ‘returnees’ find a highly congenial environment to pursue their project of living a ‘better life’ in the ancestral homeland. METHOD Thirty in-depth interviews with second-generation Turkish-Germans, mostly in their 30s and 40s, were carried out in and around Antalya in 2014. Narratives were coded and prepared for thematic analysis using NVivo. RESULTS According to thematic analysis of interview narratives, many respondents were seeking to ‘escape’ from difficult personal, family, and economic situations. They mobilised their human capital of educational qualifications, language skills, and life experience to set up or get jobs in hotels, restaurants, and other tourist services, combining work with a relaxed attitude to life in what they saw as a ‘paradise’ of natural beauty and social open-mindedness. Alongside these practical considerations of seeking a better work– life balance were more existential themes of rediscovering their ‘true selves’ and reinventing the meaning of ‘home’ in this cosmopolitan niche. 1 University of Surrey, United Kingdom. E-Mail: [email protected]. 2 University of Sussex, United Kingdom. E-Mail: [email protected]. http://www.demographic-research.org 1491 Kılınç & King: The quest for a better life: Second-generation Turkish-Germans ‘return’ to ‘paradise’ 1. Introduction ‘Lifestyle migration’ has emerged as a major type of migratory movement in recent years (Benson and O’Reilly 2009a, 2009b; Benson and Osbaldiston 2014), challenging the assumption that migration is mainly explained by reference to economic factors. Whilst the ‘rational choice’ optic of neoclassical economics is still relevant in its framing of labour migration, where there is a self-evident desire to find work and a higher income, there is now recognition of an increasing diversification of migration types based on the characteristics and motivations of the migrants, their life stages, and the directionality of the movement (Halfacree 2004; King 2002). In particular, there is a renewed research interest in return migration and its theorisation (Cassarino 2004). In this paper we apply the lifestyle-migration framework to examine the ‘return’ of second-generation Turkish-Germans3 to the southern coastal region of Turkey. We put ‘return’ in quotation marks since this not a true return in migration-statistical terms: our research participants were born and brought up in Germany, and they are ‘returning’ to a country which their labour-migrant parents left during the 1960s and 1970s. By putting emphasis on this paradoxical condition we highlight that return is not necessarily an act of ‘homecoming’, especially in the case of the second generation. For people in diaspora, ‘home’ is often said to have a dual meaning embedded within a “tension between the real experience of home and its idealized form” (Moore 2000: 212). Much return migration research has explored ‘the myth of return’ in the complex sphere of “living here and remembering/desiring another place” (Clifford 1994: 311). Our objective in this paper is to explore the case of returnees who opt for a life in a touristic region where they reinvent their notion of home outside the duality of the ‘here’ of their German town of departure and the ‘there’ of their parents’ place of origin. Our analysis is built around answers to the following research questions. First, how come the second-generation Turkish-Germans decide to relocate to the home country of their parents? Second, why do they choose the region of Antalya as their place of resettlement? And third, how does living in Antalya reconfigure their ideas of ‘home’ and belonging? We locate our research within the wider phenomenon of counter-diasporic migration (Christou and King 2014), arguing that the ‘return’ of the second generation challenges traditional conceptualisations of home and bounded definitions of identity. Our previous research focusing on the resettlement of second-generation Turks in Istanbul and small towns has highlighted the complex nature of home for this transnational group (Kılınç 2014; King and Kılınç 2014). Those who relocated to Istanbul, Turkey’s largest metropolitan centre, value the cosmopolitan atmosphere of 3 For the purposes of this research, we conceptualise ‘second-generation Turkish-Germans’ as the Germany- born children of Turkish labour migrants to Germany. 1492 http://www.demographic-research.org Demographic Research: Volume 36, Article 49 the city and its varied employment opportunities, although there are also disappointments and frustrations, such as high living costs, the chaos of the city and its traffic, and the corruption and lax professional standards in the working environment. The second generation who settled in rural small towns based their choices firmly on kinship networks, with the expectation of living in a familiar and secure environment. However, these respondents expressed their anxieties about feeling different and even oppressed in their homeland communities. In both cases, parental influence played a major role in framing the second generation’s idea of ‘home’ and the physical place of return. In the case of Antalya, we observe a different dynamic of second-generation ‘return’: what is important here is the uniqueness of the place as a touristic region, offering a more open and flexible lifestyle in an environmentally and culturally attractive setting. Most participants’ parents emigrated from other parts of Turkey, not Antalya: hence it is relatively a neutral place for the second generation. Following Massey’s (1995: 59) concept of place as “a meeting-place, the location of intersections of particular bundles of activity space, of connections and interrelations, of influences and movements”, we suggest an understanding of place wherein change, openness, and interconnectivity are manifested. As our Antalya research demonstrates, ‘home’ appears as a mobile and overarching concept beyond the borders of physical locality. At the same time, it is the specificity and attractive character of Antalya which enables the second generation to find ‘belonging’, rather than family-history ties. Therefore, these narratives help us understand ‘home’ in broader sets of connections beyond its grounded, sedentary, and kinship affiliations. We review key literature on lifestyle migration and locational preference in the next section. In the subsequent section we give some brief background on the Turkish migration to Germany. Then we describe our methodology, including the geographical setting of the fieldwork in southern Turkey. Our findings are presented under the general heading of ‘narratives of lifestyle choices’ and explore, firstly, various accounts of the return process and its outcomes, including previous holiday experiences in the area, the desire to interact with German- and English-speaking tourists, and the possibilities for employment and business development in the tourist economy. Secondly, we move to more reflective and existential accounts, relating to escapism, the quest for an ‘alternative’ way of life, and the (re-)discovery of a sense of self. These narratives are tangled with the concept of ‘home’, interplaying between and across the dichotomies of place-attachment versus mobility, as drawn out further in the conclusion. http://www.demographic-research.org 1493 Kılınç & King: The quest for a better life: Second-generation Turkish-Germans ‘return’ to ‘paradise’ 2. Lifestyle migration and second-generation ‘return’ Theories of international migration privilege economic, political, demographic, and social-network factors as the key drivers of international movement (see e.g., Brettell and Hollifield 2015; Castles et al. 2014). The notion that migration is also ‘produced’ by noneconomic factors related to lifestyle and personal environmental preference – that it can be an act of consumption – is relatively new, and is a radical departure from standard conceptualisations of migration as a means to an end, such as the economic improvement of the